The World Social Forum: What it could mean for the Indian left

by Kunal
Chattopadhyay

After three
editions in Brazil, the World Social Forum in 2004 will be held in India. For
the Indian left, it could have been a great opportunity for rethinking politics.
Unfortunately, significant sections think otherwise. So there is the risk of the
Forum coming and going, but nothing positive emerging.

For readers
outside India, this requires some explanation. The Indian left has a complex
character, and an understanding of this is crucial for any attempt to situate
the significance of the WSF in Mumbai. The explanation that follows is
necessarily schematic, and for Indian readers, it will appear to have omitted
much. I can only plead that this is not an essay on the history of the left, but
an attempt to bring out certain elements which are needed explain the present
situation of the left in India.

The Left in India—Some Background

The left in India developed out of the freedom movement.
Militant nationalists who were in favor of armed struggle to overthrow British
rule were enthused by the Russian revolution. The Communist Party of India
(CPI), first “founded: in Tashkent in 1920, but in reality in 1925, when a
number of Communist groups united at a conference in India, was virtually
smashed by the Meerut Conspiracy Case of 1929. By the time the party was
rebuilt, the grip of Stalinism on the international Communist movement was
almost absolute. From then on, Indian Communism knew few of the debates and
uncertainties that Communist parties experienced elsewhere.

Attempts were made, by different forces, to form
anti-Stalinist parties [beginning mostly in the 1930s]. The three main efforts
were: (1) formation of the Revolutionary Socialist Party of India, with a
significant input from revolutionary nationalists who did not want to join the
CPI but were becoming Marxists; (2) the Revolutionary Communist Party of India,
led by Saumyendranath Tagore, who, under a pseudonym, had been a delegate to the
Sixth Congress of the Comintern [in 1928], had been impressed by some of the
criticisms made by Trotsky and the Left Opposition, and had been expelled for
his pains when he tried, back home, to convince his comrades; and (3) the
Bolshevik Leninist Party of India, the Indian Section of the Fourth
International.

A combination of several factors ensured that none of these
could become well entrenched as alternatives to the CPI. In the first two
parliaments of independent India [independence having been won in 1947], the CPI
emerged as the major left-wing opposition. But this success also deepened an
electoralist orientation. The supposedly deep theoretical dispute over whether
the stage of revolution in India was to be “national democratic” or “people’s
democratic,” and whether the section of the “progressive” bourgeoisie with which
the working class was to ally itself was of one or the other kind, ultimately
could be reduced to a question of which kind of opportunist alliance was to be
forged — with so-called left Congress forces (the Indian National Congress being
the historic bourgeois party) or with opposition bourgeois and petty bourgeois
parties. This resulted in a split [during the 1960s]. However, one component of
the split was disagreement over international issues.

The left wing
in the CPI, which was critical of the excessive electoralist orientation,
falsely identified Khrushchev as the inspirer of this strategy. There was good
precedence for this strategy from the Stalin era, notably the People’s Front
days of the 1930s and ‘40s. But the role of the Communist Party of China (CCP)
was a vital factor. The CCP had the aura of a recently accomplished revolution,
and it seemed to be denouncing Khrushchevite revisionism from the left. At the
same time, it defended Stalin, and itself developed a “personality cult,” of
Mao, which had important consequences in India.

The split in
the CPI resulted in the formation of the “right” CPI, which openly advocated an
alliance with the progressive national bourgeoisie, but which also had a more
democratic (or at least less autocratic) inner party regime. The left split-off,
the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), was to become the world’s
most unreconstructed Stalinist party. But it incorporated in an uneasy alliance
two wings — those who wanted accommodation within the capitalist state under
somewhat different theoretical premises than the CPI, and those who wanted an
armed struggle to overthrow the “comprador-ruled, semi-feudal, semi-colonial
state,” as they characterized India. Within a few years, this wing started
accusing the other wing of the CPI(M) of being equally revisionist and
opportunist, and eventually it split off to form the CPI(ML) and a few other
Maoist parties. The spark which led to the split was a peasant uprising in
Naxalbari, from which came the name “Naxalites” [a term often used in the press
for the Maoists]. The CPI(ML) and the other Maoist groups splintered, united,
splintered, and in the process, the original radicalism was lost. Before looking
at that history, however, we need to look at a few other sectors of the left.

The Congress
Socialist Party (CSP) had been a left-wing formation inside the Congress Party,
including some Marxists as well as various other currents. When a successful
entry into the CSP by the CPI caused a severe decline in the strength and
popularity of the CSP, anti-Communism was added to the ideological mix of the
CSP. Eventually, some of its leading lights switched to Gandhism or liberalism,
while others developed a concept of “social justice” that strongly emphasized
caste issues, partly as a counterpoint to class, and partly in genuine
recognition of the specificity of the Indian social formation. Stalinist
ideology tended to view caste as an element of “feudalism” and to argue that
capitalist development would automatically abolish caste discrimination. The
socialists therefore saw in caste oppression both a genuine point whereby
common, exploited people could be mobilized, and a point from which the
socialists could claim their Indianness and superiority over “Moscow-trained”
Communists. However, despite substantial western Social Democratic funding and
other forms of help, the Socialists proved to be ineffectual in advancing
electorally. This, together with a previous anarchist influence, led to an anti-statist,
anti-party tendency among them, which, however, was surprisingly able to remain
within CSP structures. After independence, the CSP merged with another party,
the KMPP. But they also had a record of splits, forming the SSP (united
socialist party) and the PSP.

In the 1967
elections, the ruling Congress Party suffered major blows, and in a number of
provincial legislative assemblies it fell short of the halfway mark. But forming
governments under such circumstances necessitated left-right alliances,
stretching from the Jana Sangh (forerunner of the present ruling party, the
Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP) and the right-wing Swatantra Parry to the
Socialists and the Communists. Maoist pressure kept the CPI(M) out except where
the Jana Sangh and the Swatantra were kept out. The CPI, in contradiction to its
own erstwhile theory that the “progressive bourgeoisie” was in the Congress
Party, had fewer scruples about joining coalition governments. By and large the
experiences were disastrous, with each partner in the coalition pushing its own
agenda. But this, and subsequent experiences of short-term governance, also
shaped the consciousness of younger generations of cadres in diverse ways. While
a new breed of apparatchiks came up, interested only in the realities of
power—the likes of Anil Biswas, Biman Bose, and Buddhadev Bhattacharjee of the
CPI(M) in West Bengal, for example—others became intensely anti-parliament. In
the case of the Maoists, this was encapsulated in the slogans: “Political power
grows out of the barrel of a gun”; and “Parliament is a pigsty.”

These Maoists
boycotted not only elections, but mass organizations, and called for immediate
revolution. Charu Majumdar, the main cult leader of the CPI(ML), even
“predicted” that the Indian revolution would be accomplished in the year 1975.
Cadres were trained in the politics of annihilating the class enemy. The state
hit back with utmost brutality. Thousands were murdered, in fake encounters, in
jail killings, in killings organized by the bourgeois and Stalinist parties. For
example, in Barranagore-Cossipore, in the suburbs of Calcutta, Congress-backed
thugs systematically hunted out Maoists and murdered them while a major escape
route was kept blocked by CPI(M) cadres. The arrest and death of Majumdar broke
up the CPI(ML).

Every time
someone made a bid to argue that there should be more systematic mass work, that
there should be trade union activities, or that in a country where elections are
so deep-rooted the radical left cannot simply ignore elections, they were
denounced as “neo-revisionists” and on occasion murdered. Eventually, by the
mid-1990s, there were a few distinct currents. The biggest moderate Maoist group
was the CPI(ML) Liberation. In the late 1970s, it had grown in Bihar through
organizing armed struggle and by fighting for the rights of agricultural
laborers, poor peasants, and dalits (those of the lowest castes, the
“untouchables”).

When the
CPI(ML) Liberation tried to spread to other provinces, it realized that more
sophisticated politics were needed in places where the ruling class was not
obliging it by blatant caste violence, etc. In particular, it also realized,
after years of denouncing others, that elections could not be simply ignored,
nor was it always useful to call for a boycott of elections. But when it made
the turn, it took over many of the typical habits of Stalinism in India. Thus,
instead of fighting within existing unions for class struggle orientations, it
quickly floated its own “Central” Union, the All India Coordinating Committee of
Trade Unions (AICCTU). This of course provides certain advantages — e.g.,
getting invited to meetings at the all-India level, getting access to ILO
contacts, and so on, in a way that radical forces inside a different central
union might not get.

But such small
advantages are far outweighed by the fact that this so-called revolutionary
unionism brings one more split into the fragmented trade union movement. Indeed,
even where independent unitary unions were built, cadres of the CPI(ML)
Liberation often acted to split the unions in the interest of affiliating a
fragment to the AICCTU.

By the late
1990s, the CPI(ML) Liberation had indeed spread somewhat. But its real
mobilizational power remained restricted to Bihar, and to Assam, where it had
incorporated the Karbi Anglong movement. Its one MP came from Assam. In West
Bengal, it proved to be a damp squib. In particular, its pretension of being an
electoral alternative to the CPI(M) proved to be a total joke, with a large
portion of its candidates in municipal elections getting votes in two figures.
In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous province, it tried to make headway by
allying with the bourgeois party of Mulayam Singh Yadav, at one stage defense
minister in the United Front government, especially in the petty bourgeois
milieu of student politics, which remains its major recruiting ground in the
cities.

Another major
Maoist pole that developed was the threesome — CPI(ML) People’s War Group, or
PWG; CPI(ML) Party Unity, or PU; and the Maoist Communist Center (MCC). These
are the three main forces still insisting on the original armed struggle line,
annihilation of the class enemy, and so on. Despite internecine turf wars among
themselves, two of them, the PWG and the PU, united to form the CPI(ML) PW.
These forces are extremely opportunistic. Since, according to their analysis,
all other parties are bourgeois parties in the service of one or another
fraction of a comprador bourgeoisie, they feel free to make any short-term
alliance with any party against any other. So they make short-term alliances
with various bourgeois parties in order to get footholds in different areas. In
West Bengal, for example, where the CPI(M) is in power, at one stage they allied
with the CPI(M), and at another stage with the right-wing regional party, the
Trinamool Congress, which is a part of the BJP-led central government regime.
They also use murderous violence in order to establish their control over
different areas. The fact that there are extensive areas in India where even the
twentieth century has hardly penetrated till now, however, gives their line of
armed resistance and “protection” a seeming attraction to oppressed poor
peasants and ethnic groups.

From
Penetrating Society to Building NGOs

But from the
mid-1970s, new developments were taking place, both within the Maoist and the
Socialist milieus. In Gujarat, the radicalizing youth launched a non-party
movement called Nav Nirman (New Construction). Only a very small wing became
Marxists. Others imbibed ideologies of different types and came up with
basically a rejection of the party system, a determination to work within civil
society for social transformation, and to fight for civil liberties. The long
terror unleashed, first in West Bengal to smash the Maoists and the CPI(M), and
then all over India during the one and a half year of dictatorial government by
Indira Gandhi, increased the commitment to civil liberties.

Many Maoist
cadres, for their part, found that in order to gain the confidence of the
people, it was necessary to do something other than simply preach armed struggle
— except in pockets where the level of oppression was such that armed struggle
was the only road to even the faintest of reforms. Finally, from the 1970s, a
series of new social movements were developing: feminism; the dalit movement (a
renewed movement among the lowest castes against caste oppression); struggles of
tribal peoples where tribal survival rights and environmental issues were
inextricably mixed (for example, whether the tiger should be saved simply by
driving out tribal populations from their long-standing areas and occupations,
or whether in the name of development forests should be cut down with effects on
both the ecology and the tribal way of life, as in the Chipco movement); a
significant anti-nuclear movement; a growing health movement involving both
radicals in medical jobs and ordinary people who felt they had a right to know
what was being done to them as well as a right to a minimum of decent health
care, and so on. What was common to these movements was a deep suspicion of the
purely electoralist orientation of all parties, including the mainstream left
parties.

New movements
called forth new organizations, or breathed life into old ones. And there were
inevitable conflicts, some common the world over, some specific to the Indian
situation, between old mass organizations and parties, on the one hand, and the
new organizations. This was to result in the formation of a new type of radical
milieu. The movements stressed autonomy, identity, and participatory democracy.
By autonomy they meant that the movement must be independent of state control as
well as control by any other external force — including political parties. The
stress on identity was a response to all overarching claims that sought to
subsume distinct struggles under a hegemonic banner. This included nationalism
as well as the claim that the resolution of the class struggle would solve all
other issues in passing.

At the same
time, since many of the activists were members of the radical parties, this
created a contradiction. They seemed to be living in two worlds. As a leading
Trotskyist and feminist activist of the 1970s and 1980s, Vibhuti Patel, once
told me, “I spend time telling my comrades in the party that feminism cannot be
treated as a separatist movement and that the struggle for women’s liberation
cannot be postponed till the socialist revolution is achieved; and I keep
telling my friends in the women’s movement that the struggle for women’s
liberation cannot be won unless we link it to the class struggle.” This was from
a Trotskyist, a member of an organization that had more than a formal commitment
to women’s liberation.

Every new form
of struggle of the oppressed faced this problem. In some cases there were
breakaway parties, like the Satya Shodhak Communist Party, a breakaway group
from the CPI(M) which stressed that there was a need to link caste and class
struggles in India. In many more cases, however, individual cadres of left
parties, whether the mainstream or more often the Maoist left, as well as youth
influenced by Lohiaite views about caste oppression [that is, those who followed
the views of the late Ram Manohar Lohia, a socialist leader who stressed caste
struggles], plus Jay Prakash Narayan’s ideas about partyless democracy, turned
to forming new types of organizations, either after dropping their party
memberships, or retaining that membership, but keeping two distinct identities.

A whole series
of voluntary organizations were formed at that time. Initially, these were
formed by radicals who thought they would be carrying on the class struggle, the
caste liberation struggle, the women’s liberation struggle, etc., through these
means. So these were open and democratic organizations. However, many of these
groups soon found that there was a need to organize services, to work in such a
manner within civil society that some self-help could be arranged, and so on.
This meant the transformation of the structure of the organization. Willy-nilly,
it was now working within civil society while accepting the existing social and
political framework, especially the state. It was now making demands upon the
state for reforms. This did not make the movement, or those sectors of the
movement, automatically reformist. But this did pose serious questions before
the Marxists working within those organizations or in those movements about what
they should do in order to raise within every partial movement the historic,
long-term goals of struggle, and what the appropriate ways of doing that should
be.

This was where
several problems converged. The first problem was simply a problem of funding. A
mass movement finances itself — often badly, sometimes a little better, with
contributions from active members as well as less active sympathisers. But when
the focus shifts to building a special apparatus, such as a documentation center,
or a shelter for battered women, or a literacy center (in effect, an alternative
educational structure), there is always a pressure and a temptation to look
beyond these sources. Badly printed booklets do not serve the cause of literacy
and post-literacy continuing education well, nor do ill-paid volunteer medical
workers or ill-paid “full-timers” serve the cause of any health or other
movement for long. Sheer survival needs will drive many of them elsewhere. Back
in the late 1970s, the aims were quite modest. It seemed quite a lot to offer
400 rupees per month to (about $40 then) for a volunteer full-timer to go and
work in a remote rural area, such as Jharkhand. But even this fund was not
easily obtainable.

So there began
a search for funds, which led to a transformation of many of the voluntary
organizations. In many of the cases this led back to the Indian state, under the
claim that the state has the constitutional duty of providing for many services
to the people, so there is nothing wrong with insisting that this be done partly
though these voluntary organizations. In other cases there were linkages formed
with like-minded people abroad, especially in the First World, and funding often
came from them. However, once this funding began, and a definite structure came
into existence, new dynamics began taking over. Regular funding became, from a
partial goal, the central object of the fund-receiving organization. The search
for donors steadily became more indiscriminate. And eventually, this meant a
softening of the political stance. This happened in ways which are not unique to
India. On one hand, donors began insisting on conditions to be fulfilled, and on
the other hand, they began making funds more easily available for certain types
of projects rather than certain other types.

International
agencies like the United Nations and its various organizations played an
important role in this process. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a
dramatic change. The small voluntary organization which was linked to the mass
movement still existed, but it was increasingly elbowed out by a chain, which
ran from international donor agencies to large donor organizations in India with
headquarters in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, etc., on to local offices or smaller
NGOs in big cities, and through them to lesser NGOs in small towns, rural areas,
or in working class or pauperized sectors of the big cities. And the entire
language of the bulk of the NGOs had shifted. They tended to view the masses
whom their activities served as “beneficiaries.” A clear hierarchy had sprung
up. Behind the continuing veneer of participatory democracy, the reality was one
of a steadily growing bureaucratization. In addition, NGOs, even when totally
honest and dedicated, fostered relations of dependency.

Anti-globalization and Different Responses

Much of this
is probably duplicated elsewhere. But the Indian left milieu is also marked by a
considerable insularity. Relatively little about India gets reported in the
West, and Indians in turn often get to know only about some few movements and
struggles abroad. In part this is because the ex-Stalinist left in India, now
half settled into a social democratic mold, albeit with organizational patterns
that serve as reminders of their origins, retains a few set priorities. The
Palestinian cause, for example, gets fairly strong coverage, as does Cuba
solidarity. But the whole implication of the rise of the PT (the Workers Party,
in Brazil), its subsequent turn to the right, with Lula accepting IMF terms,
along with the complicated dynamics of Lula getting elected, and so on, has had
no resonance in India. (Parenthetically, the present author found this out
recently while trying to get signatures for a petition supporting the left wing
of the PT.)

Also, the bulk
of the Indian left took a stand rather uncritically in favor of Milosevic, while
another wing, later on, in calling Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi,
architect of a massive pogrom of Muslims in 2002 the “Milosevic of India,”
showed that they had adopted some of the U.S.-sponsored rhetoric.

The degree of
insularity is best understood by looking at the early stages of the
anti-globalization struggles. At the time of Seattle, there were very few public
demonstrations on the day in India. During the Prague events in 2000, in
Calcutta, Protest Initiative, a left regroupment effort involving the Inquilabi
Communist Sangathan (West Bengal State Committee) (the ICS is the Indian Section
of the Fourth International), the Majdoor Mukti Committee, the Nari Nirjatan
Pratirodh Mancha (Forum Against Oppression of Women), the Sramajeevi Mahila
Samity (Women Workers’ Association), the Indian Rationalist Association, and
others organized a daylong program. But the mainstream left did not mobilize;
nor did the CPI(ML) Liberation, which claims to be the real pole for an
alternative left but which in fact is shifting simply to occupy the left
reformist spot vacated by the CPI(M) as it becomes a servant of capitalist
neoliberalism.

Two events
have since then served to turn the bulk of the left around. One is the Asian
Social Forum, held in Hyderabad in 2002, and the other is the global protest
against the war in Iraq. Even the most insular of forces could not but be
impressed by the depth of worldwide antiwar, anti-imperialist sentiments
expressed in February–March 2003. However, the CPI(M) moved swiftly once it
realized the potential, only in order to kill it off. Cashing in on the feelings
of unity and nonpartisan mobilization, it organized a central program which had
only slogans on the U.S.-British intervention in Iraq, and which in the name of
unity did not allow others to have their own slogans, their own posters,
analyses, etc.

In particular,
there was a flat rejection of all attempts to bracket the regimes of India and
Pakistan as twin warmongers and right-wing nuclear hawks, showing the
ambivalence that has always marked the CPI(M)’s nuclear policy. It had always
supported the India government’s policy of keeping the nuclear option open. When
the Pokharan II nuclear tests were conducted, it rushed to protect the Indian
scientists (led by current President of India A.P.J. Abdul Kalam) for their
achievement, as though today, when the basic scientific principles and
technologies of nuclear power and weapons are so well known, the achievement can
in any way be detached from the explicitly warlike purpose. On the question of
Kashmir, during the Kargil War (1999), the CPI(M)-led Left Front government of
West Bengal broke up demonstrations and arrested peace marchers.

So the
imposition of this artificial unity had the effect of stifling voices of
protest. Many trade unions accepted this, because their leaders, themselves
often CPI or CPI(M) activists, argued that imperialism is the principal
contradiction, so all other issues should be subordinated to the
anti-imperialist struggle.

An attempt was
made to organize a second major pole, where all would be allowed to come with
their own banners and leaflets, so long as they agreed to two central slogans —
opposing imperialist aggression in Iraq, and opposing warmongering by India and
Pakistan. This time the effort was torpedoed by a most unlikely combination. The
CPI(ML) Peoples War does not function openly as a party, but only through front
organizations. It, as well as the front organization of the MCC, joined hands
with the West Bengal state unit of the National Alliance of Peoples’ Movements
to scuttle the bid to form an inclusive bloc by arguing that neither political
parties nor NGOs should form part of the alliance. Their plea to exclude parties
played on the anti-party sentiment of many people, but had the ulterior motive
of excluding those organizations which openly function as parties while allowing
their own front groups full freedom. The National Alliance of Peoples’ Movements
is of course a different type of network. It was initiated by the Narmada Bachao
Andolan (Save the Narmada Campaign, one of India’s best-known pro-toiler
environmentalist organizations) and it includes diverse mass organizations as
well as NGOs. For the NAPM, or even for one of its units, to flatly reject
working with NGOs on the ground that they are agents of imperialism, was a
surprising stand, reflecting more likely the personal stand of a few leading
members of the state unit. As a result, several small initiatives developed, and
none could be sustained for long.

As for the
CPI(M)-led initiative, it observed a big “Day” and a big weeklong program, and
then fizzled out, because it had not been interested in allowing the development
of popular initiatives but of channeling them into a rigid bureaucratic
structure. Outside West Bengal, with the CPI(M) lacking the twin forces of
governmental power and the huge size of its West Bengal party apparatus, such
dominant roles have not been played by any force. But while all forces have
sought to mobilize against the war, the splits have been repeated. Basically,
three loose poles have developed — the mainstream left (and sometimes the CPI(ML)
Liberation along with it); the armed struggle camp and other sectarians who tag
along with them; and a more mixed bag, including non-Stalinist left forces, some
NGOs, some independent trade unions, and others (the NAPM West Bengal State
unit’s action did not reflect the general politics of the NAPM, as I commented
earlier).

Mobilizations
over globalization saw a similar divide. For the mainstream left, ensconced in
power for over a quarter of century in the province of West Bengal, it is not
capitalist globalization per se that is bad, but the effort by imperialism to
corner the gains of this globalization. In consonance with this stance, the
mainstream left parties, notably the CPI(M), have welcomed private sector
investments and have sought to show that they are capable of playing a balancing
role between labor and capital. But the reality is one of surrender to
globalization disguised under much rhetoric. Government funding for education
and health, never a fantastic amount, has declined, including in West Bengal.

The West
Bengal government has now stated clearly that it will no longer pay the salaries
of teachers appointed to new posts in colleges. In schools, a school service
commission has been set up to centralize appointments. This has two effects — it
ensures that a fair sprinkling of party cadre get jobs — the West Bengal
equivalent of the Nomenklatura — and it slows down the entire process of
appointments, in effect cutting down employment in the educational sector.

At the college
level, university rules state that any college, in order to open a full-fledged
department offering honours courses, must have at least four teachers. But the
government has sanctioned, in dozens of colleges, and all told in hundreds of
departments, either one or two teachers. Colleges have been told that if they
need more posts, they should appoint teachers on contract, at fixed salaries,
and without such things as continuity of service, accumulated leave, retirement
benefits, and so on. But even this salary can only be paid by hiking tuition
fees from the present level (between 50 and 70 rupees per month) to several tens
of thousands of rupees per year.

In hospitals,
free services have been drastically cut, and the quality of the remaining free
services have become such that they can lead to the demise of the recipient.
Though the population of Calcutta has grown massively, in 25 years of Left Front
rule no new government hospital has been opened. The government has also been
moving slowly but definitely toward curbing dissent. It has freely used the
terrorist tag against its opponents. And it has displayed its commitment to
globalization by turning against even reformist trade union struggles for
concessions for the workers, even while at the all-India level the CPI(M)
continues to mouth platitudes about the rights of workers. Government efforts on
environmental protection show the same upper class orientation. Several thousand
people were driven out of their “illegal” shantytown dwellings, and in one case
the entire massive shantytown was “accidentally” set on fire. Activists of the
Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, as well as other
organizations like those fighting for the ousted residents, were arrested. In
rural West Bengal, in the name of combating Maoism and “separatism,” a
horrifying level of violence has been unleashed, justified before the bourgeois
media, and thereby substantially hushed up.

Nonetheless,
the CPI(M) despite its rightward-moving trajectory, cannot simply turn its back
on the working class. Its main electoral and social base remains the working
class and the rural poor. So it has adapted to the anti-globalization struggles.
It was one of the key players in organizing the Asian Social Forum at Hyderabad.
Formally the party was absent. But with a plethora of party-controlled mass
fronts packing the arrangements, there was no problem with CPI(M) leaders
getting ample space at the Forum. At the same time, by taking a stand supporting
the exclusion of parties, they made sure that smaller left parties did not get
much space.

The CPI(M) and
the CPI continue to be important actors in organizing the upcoming World Social
Forum in Mumbai, and it is desirable that such forces are part of the WSF. The
point is, they have shown that, on the one hand, they will use their strength to
push out other forces as far as possible. And on the other hand, they will try
to use the WSF as a platform to mask their actual surrender to neoliberalism.

The NGO sector
is of course well represented, even overrepresented at the WSF. And many of the
NGOs do not even realize that their agenda turns them into safety nets for
capitalism, not instruments of struggle. But at the same time, there are plenty
of NGOs that take a different, and more radical, stand. But the mainstream left
and the bulk of the radical left are dead set against all NGOs. Two recent
attacks on the WSF display this. During the Asian Social Forum, the CPI(ML) PW
called for a boycott and a counter-program. This time too, they have been trying
to set up an alternative called Mumbai Resistance.

Ultraleft and Sectarian Attacks on
the World Social Forum and the Brazilian Workers Party— their partial validity
and ultimate failure

An ideological
think tank connected to some Maoist groups in India has come out with a
publication asserting that the WSF is a creation of imperialism. In a nutshell,
the following is a summary of the points made by the publication entitled
“The
Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum: Lessons for the Struggle
against ‘Globalization’” by the Research Unit for Political Economy
(RUPE):

A militant protest movement against
the depredations of international capital came to the fore at the December 1999
Seattle conference of the World Trade Organization, and raged for one and a half
years thereafter.

Failing to curb this movement by
open force, imperialism sought a political strategy.

It was in this context that the WSF was initiated by ATTAC, a
French NGO platform devoted to lobbying international financial institutions to
reform and humanize themselves, and by the Brazilian Workers Party, whose
leftist image and “participatory” techniques of government have not prevented it
from scrupulously implementing the stipulations of the International Monetary
Fund (IMF).

The WSF meetings in Brazil for the past three years have
tapped the widespread, inarticulate yearning for another social system.
However, the very principles and structure of the WSF ensure that it will not
evolve into a platform of people’s action and power against imperialism.

In the WSF, decisions are controlled by a handful of
organizations, many of them with considerable financial resources and ties to
the very countries which control the existing world order.

The WSF gatherings are structured to give prominence to
celebrities of the NGO world, who propagate the NGO worldview. Thus, in all the
talk about “alternatives,” the spotlight remains on alternative policies
within the existing system, rather than a change of the very system itself.

Not only does the WSF as a body receive funds from agencies
which are tied to imperialist interests and operations, but innumerable bodies
participating in the WSF too are dependent on agencies like the Ford Foundation.

“Globalization,” a misleading word for the current onslaught
by imperialism, can be resisted, and even defeated, by a combination of
struggles at various levels, in various countries, in various forms; and forces
fighting “globalization” will need to join hands in struggle against it.
However, a careful analysis reveals that the World Social Forum is not an
instrument of such struggle. It is a diversion from it.

The picture
presented by the RUPE, as summarized above, is substantially unreal. Of course
imperialism will inevitably try to penetrate any movement. There are radicals
who, while opposing imperialism, do not even take time to think whether they
should criticize the Taliban. Their grounds are that the Taliban are actually
fighting the U.S. Activists on the extremist fringe of Maoism have expressed
anger over people’s failure to solidarize with the Taliban. What they did not
mention was that they and the U.S. had both supported the Taliban once upon a
time, against the secular Soviet-backed regime. It was a serious mistake, even a
crime, for the USSR to have invaded Afghanistan. But revolutionary developments
in Afghanistan, especially the government of Taraki, preceded the Soviet
invasion, and the period that began with the 1978 revolution (which brought the
Taraki regime to power) was the one in Afghan history when social progress was
achieved in some measure. Imperialism opposed that regime, and funded diverse
Islamic fundamentalist groups, all in the name of the right to
self-determination and democracy. When imperialism fell out with the Taliban
they in turn were attacked.

The same
radicals who support the Taliban are now turning their guns against the WSF,
guided by the hoary old Maoist conception of “the principal contradiction” and
“the principal aspect of the principal contradiction” (derived from Mao’s essay
On Contradiction). When so-called “social imperialism” (the Soviet
bureaucracy and its allies) was considered the main enemy, Maoists were willing
to support a Taliban-U.S. alliance. Today, having woken up after the collapse of
the bureaucratized workers’ states to the reality of U.S. imperialism, they are
under the impression that only by building a front of the “pure” can they resist
imperialist penetration of social movements.

In fact, this
shows their utter failure to understand social reality. Imperialism is not
something standing outside society. We live in a capitalist world, and every
mass movement will be tainted by capitalism and its ideology, especially in its
early stages. Marx’s method was not to argue that Communists should enter into
no movement unless it was led from the beginning by them. Rather, he stressed
that Communists should enter real movements and gain influence within them. The
rise of the NGOs was, in India as well as elsewhere, often due to the
manipulative and bureaucratic politics of the Maoists. It is surprising that
even some civil liberties activists in India, like the Association for the
Protection of Democratic Rights, take the position that they will not
collaborate with any NGO, because all NGOs are funded, ergo, agents of
imperialism.

There are two
souls of the NGOs, as we discussed earlier. On one hand they represent a desire
to break out of the entirely party-dominated political culture, a desire to find
or create space within civil society. On the other hand they also reveal major
weaknesses — not merely because they are funded organizations, but also because,
as single issue organizations, overall social transformation as an idea gets
diluted, and struggle for a very specific aim takes such precedence that as long
as that specific goal will be advanced, they are often willing to settle happily
for lobbying bourgeois politicians and capitalists. The 65,000 whom I witnessed
at the European Social Forum were mostly young, mostly committed to radical
social transformation. The over 20,000 who thronged to Hyderabad likewise
contained many who desire real social change. The way forward consists of trying
to seriously link up with their concerns and, to paraphrase the Communist
Manifesto, of raising within these struggles the historic goals of the toiling
people.

On the
Brazilian Workers Party, or PT

The attack on
the PT is also a sleight of hand. It is particularly easy in India, where few
have any idea about the kind of party the PT is, or of the tendency struggles in
it. For Indian readers mainly, let me therefore summarize briefly the
complexities of the PT, as well as the meaning of its participation in the WSF.
The PT is a new working class party. By new, I mean it was founded in 1980. It
was the result of class struggle proletarian currents deciding in Brazil that
the old left was not good enough, and that they needed a new party of the
working class, looking neither to the Moscow bureaucrats nor the Peking
bureaucrats, nor to national capitalism. Radical forces, particularly
Trotskyists, played an important role inside the PT. They included the Brazilian
section of the Fourth International, the current known as the Socialist
Democracy Tendency (SDT). There were also others, like the International Workers
League, whose comrades are no longer inside the PT, but have a fairly strong
radical left party named PSTU outside the PT. The SDT, by contrast, decided to
continue working within the PT and played an important role in shaping the
structure of the PT, including its internal democracy, the right of organized
tendencies to exist, their right to be represented in leadership bodies in
accordance with the proportion of votes received at the national Congresses of
the PT, and so on.

Seven slates competed at the November
1999 PT Congress. Their relative strength was shown by the votes they received
in the election for the National Directorate (DN). Listed in descending vote
order, the five main slates were:

Socialism or Barbarism,
grouped around Left Articulation, the largest left tendency in the PT, with 21
percent of the votes;

PT Movement,
the self-proclaimed “center” slate, with 13 percent of the votes;

Our Time,
the left slate grouped around the SDT, with 10 percent of the votes; and

Radical Democracy,
the right slate, with 8 percent of the votes.

This internal democracy, and respect for
the rights of differing tendencies, marks off the PT from both the CPI(M)-style
left, which steamrolls internal opposition, and the Maoists, who go into the
fission mode whenever differences occur.

Participatory
democracy was a concept that emerged from the left wing of the PT. It had its
limitations. The clearest limitation is the transformation of a partial solution
into a final solution. But if we take the most advanced pre-Stalinist socialist
experience—that is, the experience of Soviets, or workers’ councils—we should
recognize that in today’s world that model is inadequate in a number of ways. A
purely workplace-based setup would leave out huge numbers of proletarian and
semi-proletarian masses. At the same time, some
Trotskyists evidently had an overenthusiastic view of the participatory budget.
As Adam Novak wrote in International Viewpoint several years ago:

“These policies are underpinned and
reinforced by the expansion of the participatory budget from Porto Alegre [the
capital of Rio Grande do Sul, where the PT has headed the municipal government
since 1989] and the other municipal PT strongholds to the state administration.
The process has been surprisingly successful, and is already transforming the
relationship between the state and society.

“The participatory budget process is
based on open public meetings at the local level. These establish local
priorities for government spending, and elect delegates to a regional level,
which discusses in greater detail. State officials provide assistance and
information, but have no vote in the assembly, which approves and supervises
implementation of the final budget…”

But the most lasting contribution of the
PT project in Rio Grande do Sul may prove to be its reappropriation of democracy
as a fundamentally progressive concept. According to Ubiratan de Souza, “The
participatory budget combines direct democracy with representative democracy —
which is one of humanity’s greatest conquests, and which should be preserved and
developed. As we strive to deepen the democracy of human society, representative
democracy is necessary, but insufficient. It is more important than ever before
that we combine it with a wide variety of forms of direct democracy, where the
citizen can not only participate in public administration, but also control the
state. The participatory budget in Porto Alegre and the process of implementing
a participatory budget at the level of Rio Grande do Sul state are concrete
examples of direct democracy.”

The participatory budget in Rio Grande
do Sul was undoubtedly an important learning experience for the workers and
others who participated in the process. It undoubtedly contributed to the
participants’ understanding of economic and political questions and their desire
for more control over the decisions that affect their lives. And this concept
was not developed by those who would ultimately surrender meekly to the IMF.
However, as long as the state apparatus remains in the hands of the capitalists,
the extension of democracy to direct democracy would not be as massive a change
as Novak seems to have imagined. There would be a necessary conflict between the
aspirations of the toiling people assembled in the participatory budget’s
discussion processes, and the demands of the IMF, of imperialism, of Brazilian
big capital and the central banking system.

As Lula, the historic leader of the PT,
came closer to victory by 2002, this contradiction became evident. And Lula
chose adjustment with capitalism. For the left wing, it was a difficult choice.
They could not give up the PT before the masses supporting the PT could be
convinced. So they fought for an alternative line within the PT. As several SDT
leaders explained in articles and speeches, including at a conference where this
author was present, it was an agonizing choice, which they made because they had
been in the PT from the beginning, they had contributed hugely to the building
of this party, and they could not afford to turn their backs on it until a
significant part of the working class also decided that there was a need to
fight Lula. In other words, it was the choice that radicals inside mass parties
have often faced. They could not afford to look sectarian in the eyes of the
very masses they were trying to convince.

This left wing is very underrepresented
inside parliament — which is once again historically the usual case. In the
first critical vote, when a right-winger was appointed governor of the Brazilian
Central Bank, Senator Heloisa Helena (of the SDT) did not vote for him. By the
time Lula moved in for gutting the pension funds, a few more MPs had joined her
in opposing the PT leadership’s rightward drift. And instead of walking out of
the PT, Helena is systematically criticizing Lula, forcing the PT right into
expelling her, thereby showing in an exemplary manner to the Brazilian working
class that the PT leaders have moved away from their origins.

By flattening out the differences in the PT, by pretending
that the authors of the participatory budget and the authors of the current
course of the Brazilian regime are one and the same, the RUPE article does not
provide a really serious basis for understanding the PT experience. To
recapitulate, the key positive aspects of the PT experience are: the rise of the
PT on the basis of class struggle [at a time of mass strikes, led by Lula’s
union, against the Brazilian military dictatorship in the late 1970s]; the
construction of the PT as a democratic working class party, clearly committed,
at least in its early period, to socialism; and the important role of the
radical left within it. That radical left might prove to be a hybrid
left-centrist current, if we use a now not very much understood jargon, which
means forces straddling revolutionary socialist and reformist politics, taking
one step left and the next one right. The PT participation in the WSF, till
Lula’s election, did not represent a reformist attempt at cooptation of
radicalizing tendencies, but a democratic attempt at creating space for
radicalism beyond Brazilian boundaries as well.

As outsiders
to the WSF process, the RUPE ideologues and their cothinkers use labels on those
who do participate in the WSF. It is certainly true that huge numbers of
reformist, or nonrevolutionary, organizations participate in the Social Forums.
They include well-meaning reform-minded groups like those fighting for housing
for all, and so on, to sheer cranks. But on November 9, 2002, when Florence was
brought to a standstill by a million-strong demonstration against the planned
imperialist war on Iraq, that too was associated with the European Social Forum,
the European regional version of the WSF. It was quite an experience to be
marching in that demonstration! Are we to suppose that those who called that
march are also subtle agents of imperialism? In that case, at least they provide
more support to the revolutionary cause by such huge mobilizations than anything
they provide imperialism.

But there is a
point in the criticisms of RUPE, or of the Gujarat-based members of the
Inquilabi Communist Sangathan (ICS). The latter issued a statement, falsely in
the name of the entire Indian Section of the Fourth International, though they
had not discussed it with anyone from outside Baroda, and not even with all
their Baroda comrades. This intervention was simply one that stressed the
undemocratic character of keeping political parties at arm’s length. There are
real problems here. The RUPE essay similarly takes on the WSF because it
excludes forces that use individual terrorism (in a somewhat different
formulation). This does rule out some forces on the radical left. At the same
time, some of the arguments are disingenuous. Forces like the Communist Party of
the Philippines, or the PW or MCC in India, have used violence indiscriminately.
They have murdered other left activists in their turf wars. Unless they show a
real willingness to have dialogues with other types of radicals, unless they are
serious about pluralism and wider democracy, it is difficult to see how others
on the left can provide them with much space.

The leaflet of
the Baroda ICS is different. It represents the kind of flag-waving sectarianism
that has no positive content. The PW, while opposing the WSF, has been trying to
mobilize forces. The leaflet under discussion simply lectures activists about
how central to social change a revolutionary party is. This kind of sterile and
abstract lecture is useless. Unless radical parties or would-be radical parties
can play serious roles as builders of mass struggles, of feminist struggles, of
environmentalist struggles, in the Indian context of anti-communalist and dalit-liberation
struggles, and unless they can rework their concepts of class struggle and
revolutionary party to ensure that these dimensions are properly represented,
they will remain armchair revolutionaries. The Baroda group that has issued the
leaflet has been doing its best to push out the most important trade union
activists, environmental activists, feminist activists, etc., from its fold
because these activists refuse to allow “Marxist” experts who have no experience
of the actual struggles to dictate to them how they should function in the mass
movements.

If we expect
the WSF itself to become the focal point for anti-imperialist struggles, we
would be suffering from illusions. But if we think that we can ignore this, one
of the world’s major anti-imperialist gatherings, we would simply be handing the
thing over to reformist politicians. They come in droves. They come as CPI(M)
leaders, and as European Social Democrats. And by the way, it is not quite
correct that parties can have no role. One of the key debates around the
European Social Forum was over whether and how to build a party of the European
left, and the temperature suddenly mounted in Florence when the representatives
of the French Communist Party and of the Ligue Communiste
Revolutionnaire, French Section of the Fourth
International, crossed swords. The WSF is a real event. Revolutionaries have to
go in there, be a part of the real movement, and thereby seek to influence
others in the movement. Forces like the NAPM, and others, have clearly taken a
dual-track approach, building the movement and at the same time criticizing the
NGO dependence. This alone shows the way ahead. Will the Indian left grasp this
unique opportunity?